#longsigh 29 people interviewed about tech workers: TWO are women and the story is authored by a woman [Geeky male introverts: Nashville execs on how you shouldn’t describe tech workers – Nashville Business Journal] https://www.bizjournals.com/nashville/news/2018/08/23/geeky-introverts-nashville-tech-execs-on-the-top.html

Bill Butler was posting the official economic government stats over on Facebook.

J Tod Fetherling responded: I wouldn’t give credit to any politician because then you have to take credit for the other side of the coin. The 102M not working. This is the scariest number and one we should all be discussing. 60% of the population is working to take care of the 40% not working. This ratio has grown dramatically in the past 8 years to an all time high. At the root is poverty, education, and more jobs in parts of the city where employers don’t want to be. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t01.htm

I responded to a comment J Tod Fetherling made:

Thanks so much for mentioning the unmentionable #realeconomick stats. Jim Clifton (Gallup) has been posting over at See: U.S. Economy: No Recovery, December 6, 2016 and The Invisible American, September 20, 2016 and Prof Richard Wolff (http://www.democracyatwork.info/) has been youtubeing some of his recent talks. We have some structural challenges that no politician expecting financial support is going to explore openly. (Note: I like to triangulate between my truth between “cronie” capitalists and my socialists.) I think Wolff’s assertion that folks who are employed are likely to self-censor because they fear losing employment (at the same time all the management books say employees aren’t engaged and manager/leaders need to engage them).

Why doesn’t Nashville CABLE have a LinkedIn group for member networking? #gatekeeping

# # # #

Capacity Utilization https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TCU

# # # #

Bryan Ansley:The problem is low wage jobs are 2/3rds of the ones created and 1/3 of middle class wage jobs lost have not been regained and 1/3 of higher wage jobs lost have not been regained. We have a record number of people below the poverty line and a record number of billionaires and the national debt has doubled and the Cold War has restarted and the Middle East is more unstable than I have seen it in decades. Not sure who to blame or give credit to for all this but sugar coated single stat pictures out of context don’t help us find truth.

Milt Capps ‏@miltcapps Venture validation? #Nashville #startups & Tech talent so good they get bought and move elsewhere – natural, but not what we’re hoping for.

My response:

My major fear for a gigified Nashville (ATT, Google, Comcast, NES, whomever) is that managers|C-suites will not learn that geography doesn’t always have to matter. I feel|think that the telephonification of rural America could provide an apt parable. If we bring communication to the farm, that does not equate with the adoption of the technology. If farmer Brown insists on continuing to drive into the General Store to get his real time information then much of the value of the telephone is lost.

The European Enlightenment is another good case study. Tho @jhagel and @sgblank have caused me to more greatly appreciate the value of technology clusters (Silicon Valley) and while Michael Faraday needed the facilities of the Royal Society, today’s cloud|software products|services and tech talent often do not need a similar laboratory* (they, of course, often share a similar need for patrons). The Enlightenment spread, in part, by use of the printing press. While the coffee house effect was very important, publication allowed for non-face-to-face communication on a mass scale, for those willing to avail themselves of the opportunity. Here lies my point: just because one European city did not adapt to new technologies quickly, that didn’t mean that others (their “competition”) did not.

Now that we have the entréstructure, and the hope of gigification, it is time for us to put a laser light upon the education|modification of the Nashville legacy management culture’s reticence to adopt tech to its fullest or we are lost; lost, I say! (OK, it will continue to produce sub-optimal results).

I’m open to your thoughts here because I could be way off base; I’m a teachable sort…

The Medical Banking Project (now part of HIMSS) studied this question for quite awhile. I blogged a series of topics awhile back ( http://www.mhimss.org/blog/author/5646 ; http://edodds.blogs.com/mblog/ ; http://blog.conmergence.com/work/ ) and the HIMSS World Bank Task Force did a recent whitepaper (January 2013 – The Healthcare Payments Hub: A New Paradigm for Funds and Data Transfers in Healthcare – http://www.himss.org/ResourceLibrary/ResourceDetail.aspx?ItemNumber=16607 ). John Casillas could add a lot but the things that stand out to me are: 1) Insurers have to be willing to reimburse for eHealth, telehealth, video consults, etc. As CMS and other fedgov depts have taken steps in this direction private insurers will follow. 2) Paper needs to be taken out of the administrative process (standards for matching 835 and 837s, etc.); last stat I heard was about 94% of paper claims had to be followed up with a phone call (not sure how current that stat is). 3) In TN, for historical legal reasons, nearly all state funds have gone to folks with an intellectual disability leaving very few resources for those who have a developmental disability. Gov Haslam and the legislature have turned that around lately but a lot more needs to be done unless we want it to remain an “open secret” that if you acquire a disability, we’ll do our dead level best to dump you on the other side of any state line. My wife Deana can get anyone more details — see http://ucpmidtn.org 4) The recent TN Broadband Summit spotlighted the reality the folks who can benefit most from technology (I’m thinking health over IP here) tend to be in those places where incumbent broadband providers can least afford to build out. The FCC e-rate program could theoretically help but right now it isn’t structured optimally. We’ll have to see what happens after Genachowski and McDowell are replaced. 5) The possibilities for economic development along these are stifled by tax structure (in just abut every state) because unless a project (which might hire many knowledge workers, in this case, healthcare related) actually causes someone to build or buy real estate (the way we capture revenue of the type that shows up in local econ dev employees metrics — and hence the way they keep their job, earn a bonus) it doesn’t count as “real revenue”. So you can have a situation like the Gig City where everyone could be using a software like BOINC or CPUsage for distributed computing on a superfast grid to build Glenn Ricart’s (US-Ignite) neighborhood supercomputer for medical research to cure cancer (say sponsored St. Judes) but under the current tax scheme that’s not a “real business”. Does any of this make sense to anyone else? 6) Obviously, I haven’t even touched mPayments coupled with mHealth. I realize I hop around here a bit from topic to topic — but maybe it will get a discussion a bit further down the path.

It is a mixed blessing being a technologist theist. The best part is that it gives you someone to be ultimately thankful to for the many assets provided in these times in which we live.

Colleagues are good things. Jim Long and the programmers at GM Spring Hill Manufacturing (Compuware, EDS, GM, Xerox before my time) taught me how to divide a software problem up into modules (functional concepts in classic VB); Mike Mancour and Lonnie Harriford how the same approach can be applied well to team programming. Greg Wernke taught me to QA with diligence. John Casillas pointed me in the open source direction with a comment while working with the late John Hardin on the COMBAT initiative. Mark Charleton crystallized the business case for adopting frameworks. Freddie O’Connell mentioned he thought of me when he saw an API story, a theme which continues to resonate. David Siegel, John Hagel, John Seely Brown, Kingsley Idehen have enlightened me re: the Pull approach. There are so many more of you (too numerous to mention) which make each day land in the hope side of the ledger vs. despair. Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and thanks for the gifts you’ve already given me.

What we need is a completely different way to think about capturing the national gray markets and organized crime revenues (the “cash” economies). A national sales tax which is proportioned by person so that my city gets x%, my county gets y%, my state gets z% could be a corrective. Some other tool might work better.

Why this matters
All cities and states are concerned about bringing HQs of businesses to their TAX JURISDICTION; they only care about job creation and growth in so far as it can be TAXED. This is a Zero Sum game between states and the US ranks lower in disclosure technology adoption than many other regimes, so it doesn’t bode well internationally either (from an investor’s standpoint).

Innovation isn’t geo-locked, tends to be collaborative — @BobMetcalfe talks about (single) research universities, @jhagel and JSB talk about Innovation Clusters like Silicon Valley (note: “innovation cluster” is shorthand for lazy VCs won’t hop on a plane or drive 20 minutes–and more realistically “a place with a track record of hefty DoD investment”). Kennedy spaceshots, explorations to Mars and Alpha Centauri — whatever builds the rocket engines for the contractors. Oh, weapons of mass distraction in Iran before a presidential election, you say?

The Valley and Wall Street definitely have benefits (the first of which is that’s where the VCs and hedge funds are). But if you look at the success of global open source distributed development model (which, of course, isn’t the only one) then you see that business geo-lock is a function of revenue collection, not what’s best for the foundation platforms upon which innovation is built. Again, as Jim Clifton of Gallop points out, innovation without demand is meaningless. Hence the reliance on DoD, the only bipartisanly blind part of the fedgov budget guaranteed to grow. [You want electronic medical record adoption, then militarize heathcare (or nationalize {Jed Bartlett}) see WorldVista, VA, DoD].

Current corporate goals are 1) concentration of compensation in the C-Suite (Chomsky asserts most wealth since 2007 went to the top .1%–I realize I’m conflating and sloppy logicing here due to anecdotes), 2) reduction of corporate investment in local social safety nets (workman’s comp, other disabilities related charitable service support in proportion to employee utilization, shedding of legacy pension fund liabilities 3) taking advantage of globalization where regulatory laxity and judicial corruption literally allow a firm to get away with murder (see Apple and Foxconn suicides). Until “Say on Pay” is legalized in the US (with legal force not just “suggestions”–and stock holders grow a conscience), that won’t change.

Vote Technotarian ;-)

Next RANT: Corps refuse to invest in HR Innovation to take advantage of alternative learning path credentialing (I see you’ve graduated from Khan Academy, can cure cancer, but you don’t seem to have a four year degree ;-()

Israel has evolved from a primarily agricultural economy to an enterprising technology innovator and producer. Home-grown entrepreneurship, effective government support and venture capital have combined to make Israel a research and development hub, with local industry complementing the approximately 220 R&D centers of multinational corporations, including Alcatel, Deutsche Telecom, Cisco, Google, HP, Merck, Microsoft, IBM, Intel. These global companies bring to Israel international standards for quality and service, and serve as training grounds for some of Israel’s top technological and managerial talent.

Israel spends 4.5% of its GDP on R&D, more than any country in the world. It has over 3,800 technology-based startup companies – more than any other country other than the US . Israel ranks second in the world in technology companies listed on NASDAQ, after the US, with over 70 companies per Israel’s population of seven million people. Venture capital funds worldwide have invested 2.5 times more funds in Israeli start-ups than in US-based ones.

With the world’s highest percentage of engineers and scientists in the workforce, Israel records the fifth highest number of patent filings per capita and leads the world in patents for medical equipment. In recent years, six Israeli scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize. The country is ranked third in the world in terms of quality of scientific research institutions, and first in total public expenditure on education as a percentage of GDP.

Israeli home-grown technological breakthroughs include ICQ, which pioneered and popularized instant messaging; flash memory and the USB memory stick from MSystems (bought by SanDisk); CheckPoint, which invented the Internet Firewall; IP Telephony by VocalTec; ZIP compression technology by a pair of professors at the Technion, Israel’s Technology Institute; and the ingestible camera from Given Imaging.

The Israeli government played an instrumental role in nurturing this environment. Israel’s high-tech would not have gotten off the ground were it not for its enlightened government policies. Policy makers determined that the future of the country’s economy lay in knowledge-based industries and that the necessary R&D would be fraught with risk.

Event Details

The 4th annual Women Who Tech TeleSummit will take place on May 23, 2012 via phone and web. Just like our past three sold out TeleSummits, this one will be packed with some of the most thought provoking discussions led by the most passionate and talented women in tech, startups, and social media including startup investor Joanne Wilson, WordPress usability expert Jane Wells of Automattic, Shaherose Charania, of Founders Labs and Women 2.0, Shireen Mitchell of Digital Sistats, Elisa Camahort Page, of BlogHer, Kaliya Hamlin of She’s Geeky and many more.

Women Who Tech brings together talented and renowned women breaking new ground in technology who use their tech savvy skills to transform the world and inspire change. We provide a supportive network for the vibrant and thriving community of women in technology professions by giving women an open platform to share their talents, experiences, and insights.